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60 would seem, upon that of Mr. Day, and, as a portrait, was doubtless a happy one. But the hero fails to interest, his aberrations are simply foolish, the means whereby he is redeemed too mechanical and crude, the whole both too detailed and too much condensed to hold our attention or to seem probable. The Good French Governess embodies the Edgeworthian mode of giving lessons, which was to make them pleasures, not tasks to the pupils; maxims now universally recognised and practised, but new in the days when for little children there were no pleasant roads to learning in the shape of kindergarten. The Good Aunt insists upon the necessity of home example and instruction, the lack of which no school training can supply. It is the weakest of all the tales, and verges dangerously upon the namby-pamby. Mademoiselle Panache, according to Mr. Edgeworth, is "a sketch of the necessary consequences of imprudently trusting the happiness of a daughter to the care of those who can teach nothing but accomplishments"; but which, according to most readers, will be pronounced the melancholy result of an ignorance that could mistake an illiterate French milliner for an accomplished French governess. It is unjust to lay the results of the tuition of such a personage to the charge of that favourite scape-goat, the frivolity of the French nation. The Prussian Vase, a talc, again acccording to Mr. Edgeworth, " designed principally for young gentlemen who are intended for the bar," is a pretty but apocryphal anecdote attributed to Frederic the Great, of a nature impossible to the mental bias of that enlightened despot. It is moreover an eulogium of the English mode of trial by jury.

Taken as a whole, these tales may be said to enforce the doctrine that unhappiness is more often the result